The TRUTH will set you FREE.
Sunday, August 24, 2014
Big Frackin’ Deal: The Money...from LA Progressive
Big Frackin’ Deal: The Money
The TRUTH will set you FREE.
It wasn’t that great a movie, but the one line, “Show Me The Money” has become part of our national conversation.
And now it’s “Show Us The Money” time for fracking. And here we find some surprises.
Talking about the money involved in the fracking equation takes us in three directions: the money it costs to do it, the money to be made from it, and the money it costs to clean up afterwards.
What fracking is not:
To be clear about the subject of fracking. Fracking does not exist to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. It does not exist to help our State Department so we won’t have to keep sending money to governments who don’t like us. It does not exist to keep jobs, which would otherwise be lost. Fracking exists to make the maximum amount of profit for the oil and gas companies. Period.
Consider: Jobs? Green Energy (wind, solar, tidal, geothermal) creates and sustains more jobs than oil or coal. A recent UC Berkeley report noted that, “Across a broad range of scenarios, the renewable energy sector generates more jobs per average megawatt of power installed, and per unit of energy produced, than the fossil fuel-based energy sector. “
Dependence on foreign oil? The United States produces enough oil and natural gas to export some, but we import far more.
Driving down the costs of energy? Oil and gas prices are dependent on world prices at the time of sale. No guarantees on price.
But first let’s look at the costs to get the oil. They vary, as you would expect. Drilling an oil/gas well in the New Mexico plains runs about $4 to $5 million dollars. An offshore well, depending on how deep it is, can run $500,000 a day.
And as we should all know by now, oil obtained from hydraulic fracturing and from Canada’s tar sands is very expensive oil, and will get more expensive. The reason, simply, is that the best spots have already been exploited. Everything from that point on costs more money.
The phenomenon of Peak Oil:
To understand the rationale and costs connected with fracking, we need to take a quick look at a concept called Peak Oil.
Peak Oil is a concept proposed by Shell Oil geologist M. King Hubbert, back in the 1950s. His mathematical model predicted that for any given geographical area in the world, the rate of petroleum production over time would resemble a bell-shaped curve. So if we measured production volume from the beginning of the drilling to the end, it would start slowly, rising to a peak volume, then decline until the petroleum was no longer cost effective to extract; the well would then be abandoned.
In the United States, according to economists and geologists, we have mostly seen Peak Oil. Any petroleum we get from here on will require drilling deeper, and fracking.
In the United States, according to economists and geologists, we have mostly seen Peak Oil. Any petroleum we get from here on will require drilling deeper, and fracking.
And in the United States, according to economists and geologists, we have mostly seen Peak Oil. Any petroleum we get from here on will require drilling deeper, and fracking. The National Petroleum Council estimated that 60 percent to 80 percent of all the wells drilled in the US will require fracking. And the decline in Peak Oil also means that more wells have to be drilled to get the same amount of oil out.
Return on Investment:
Obviously, the oil companies need to make more money than they’re spending. That’s the Return on Investment (ROI). There is also a factor of EROI (Energy Return on Investment) to consider.
Obviously, it takes energy to make energy. The efficiency of the energy production process is known as the Energy Return on Investment (EROI). It now takes more energy put into an oil or gas well to get the same amount of energy out; EROI has been falling for several decades.It’s worth noting that while the EROI of fossil fuels such as oil, gas, and coal have been falling, the EROI for renewables such as wind and solar are rising; currently they are five to twenty times higher than their fossil fuel counterparts. So what drillers are facing is less oil and gas available, and higher costs to get what they can.
And, now two more revelations enter, just to complicate the picture some more.
Fracking’s true Return on Investment is largely a myth.
This observation comes from Canadian Geoscientist J. David Hughes, who claims that production estimates are historically overestimated; sometimes by governments looking to boost their Gross Domestic Product figures; and sometimes by energy and oil-producing companies looking to attract investors.
Both sides tend to ignore the rate of production (how long will it take to get the oil or gas out), and the world price of petroleum on the day of the sale.
Fracked wells leak.
A lot of wells, leaking a lot.
Nationally, 6% to 7% of the wells leak soon after they’re brought on line. Considering over 100,000 wells in the US, that’s a lot of leaky wells. Further, nearly 50% of the wells will leak during their lifetimes, including those that have been abandoned. Abandoned wells may be no longer any good for making money, but they’re still under pressure. Recall that in 1963, the dam containing the Baldwin Hills Reservoir collapsed, flooding the area below. It killed five people and destroyed 60 homes. Geologists concluded that decades of extraction in the neighboring oil field led to the rupture in the dam. The dam and reservoir were part of what is now the Kenneth Hahn Recreation Area, mentioned in the second part of the story.
The costs to clean up.
This brings in the third factor: cleanup cost. This includes wear and tear on our roads (recall the 400 trucks hauling water and equipment for each well); air, water, and soil contamination cleanup; species extinction; ozone depletion; climate change; treating residents for asthma, cancer, immune system diseases, cognitive deficiencies, and birth defects.
And while the profits from fracking go to the oil and drilling companies, the cost and consequences of fracking are borne by the communities.
So you would think that after putting up with the earthquakes, the mess, the poisoned air and water, the sick people, that fracking is really worth it because we can finally become self-sufficient for the natural gas we need.
You would think. But, the US is still a net importer of natural gas. The Government Energy Information Administration predicts that we will be self-sufficient by about 2017. In the meantime, we import to meet our needs.
And so it seems odd, since we need to import so much, that we export a lot of the natural gas we produce. Last year US companies exported 1,572,413 mcf (million cubic feet) of natural gas, at an average price of $4.06/tcf (thousand cubic feet). After all, the gas belongs to the energy companies that drilled for it, so they can do pretty much what they want with it. And what they are doing is building huge facilities in Texas, Louisiana, and Oregon to liquefy the gas so they can export more of it.
A barrel of oil is 42 gallons, 160 liters.
Same picture with oil. Last year the US imported 11.4 MMbd (million barrels per day) of crude oil and refined petroleum products in 2011. We also exported 2.9 MMbd of crude oil and petroleum products, so our net imports (imports minus exports) equaled 8.4 MMbd.
Are we over a barrel?
So, this is where fracking has taken us. Our air and water poisoned, our houses ruined, and all for the short-term monetary gains for the oil and gas companies, so they can get cheaper oil and gas to sell to other countries.
Leaving us, the taxpaying public, to clean up the mess.
And it does all this behind veils of secrecy and obfuscation, in some cases daring the public to do anything about it. Unless we speak up.
And if we don’t, in the words of David Letterman: “Ladies and gentlemen—we’re screwed!”
More Info:
- Drilling Info: 10 Reasons Fracking Improves American Lives
- California Halts Injection of Fracking Waste, Warning it May Be Contaminating Aquifers
- Energy Return on Investment (EROI) for U.S. Oil and Gas Discovery and Production
- Frackwire: Fracking & well casing failure
- Fracking’s Return on Investment is a Myth
- Investment in renewable energy better for jobs as well as environment
- David Letterman show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGEc8KBKO8I&sns=fb
- U.S. Energy Information Administration: Most of the Petroleum We Use Is Produced in the United StatesNew US
Energy Secretary will Make a Decision on LNG Exports by December
- Recent Events in the Battle to Export US LNG
- Our Finite World: The Absurdity of US Natural Gas Exports
- U.S. Shale Boom Not Enough to Remove the Threat of Peak Oil
- U.S. Natural Gas Exports by Country
John MacMurray
The TRUTH will set you FREE.
5 COMPANIES AL GORE SAYS ARE DOOMED
Shell one of 5 Companies Al Gore Says Are Doomed
“Royal Dutch Shell is another company with a doomed oil sands project, according to the Carbon Tracker Initiative. Its Carmon Creek project needs oil prices to hit $157 per barrel in order to be profitable. On top of that, Royal Dutch Shell is seeking to drill for oil in the Arctic, which has already wasted $5 billion of investors’ capital and would waste more money if drilling restarted.”
By John Donovan
According to an article by Matt DiLallo published by The Motley Fool on 23 August, former US VP Al Gore believes that the balance sheets of ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell Plc, ConocoPhillips, Total SA and BP plc include $7 trillion of worthless ‘unburnable” carbon assets.
Extract
“This unburnable carbon is the oil, gas, and coal that is still in the earth that, if extracted and burned, would push the globe over the edge in terms of climate change. Because this is an edge we can’t cross, it would suggest that the companies owning the assets are all but doomed.”
Gore draws particular attention to Canadian oil sands and deepwater oil projects claiming that a recent study indicates that oil prices have to be higher than $150 per barrel for the projects to be viable.
Extract
“Royal Dutch Shell is another company with a doomed oil sands project, according to the Carbon Tracker Initiative. Its Carmon Creek project needs oil prices to hit $157 per barrel in order to be profitable. On top of that, Royal Dutch Shell is seeking to drill for oil in the Arctic, which has already wasted $5 billion of investors’ capital and would waste more money if drilling restarted.”
The TRUTH will set you FREE.
G-SPOT PRIVATE NIGHTS BY DRA. LULU MARQUEZ AIRED ON DZMM
RECORDED IN SAN DIEGO, CA JUST FOR YOU IF YOU MISSED HEARING THIS EPISODE LIVE IN FILIPINO.
PATNUBAY PO NG MGA MAGULANG AY LUBOS NA KINAKAILANGAN
SOLAR PANELS FROM TOXIC TRASH
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Scientists Discover How to Turn Toxic Trash Into Solar Panels
Lead from old car batteries can be recycled to create renewable energy.
(Photo: Armend Nimani/Getty Images)
David Kirby has been a professional journalist for 25 years. His third book, Death at Seaworld, was published in 2012.
Researchers at MIT have announced a novel technology to recycle lead from discarded car batteries and fashion it into long-lasting solar panels.
That means that after your old car battery dies, it may one day find new life, creating enough clean, renewable energy to power 30 households while also helping to reduce lead pollution. Exposure to lead has been shown to cause cognitive and behavioral problems in children.
Professors and graduate students at the university published their findings in the journalEnergy and Environmental Science. They described how recent advances in solar technology allow for the use of a lead-based substance called perovskite to make solar cells.
“Amazingly, because the perovskite photovoltaic material takes the form of a thin film just half a micrometer thick, the team’s analysis shows that the lead from a single car battery could produce enough solar panels to provide power for 30 households,” MIT said in a statement about the discovery.
The lead-based cells are nearly as efficient as silicon-based cells used commercially today, the authors said, and recycled lead is just as effective as newly smelted lead.
“Cells made from perovskite have an efficiency of 19 to 20 percent,” said Po-Yen Chen, a graduate student of chemical engineering, who coauthored the paper.
Standard silicon-based cells have an efficiency ranging from 20 to 25 percent, Chen said.
Using car batteries as a source of lead for the panels benefits the environment in at least three ways: It recycles the neurotoxic heavy metal and keeps it out of landfills, it reduces the need for mining and smelting, and it creates sustainable, nonpolluting energy.
Environmental contamination from car-battery lead is a “global pollutant” that is especially acute in the developing world,” according to the Blacksmith Institute, a nonprofit group that works to clean up highly polluted sites where children are most at risk.
Used car batteries are shipped to cities in the developing world. “Recycling and smelting operations are usually conducted in the open air, in densely populated urban areas, and often with few (if any) pollution controls [that] release lead contaminated compounds into the local environment in critical quantities,” the Blacksmith Institute stated on its website.
In the United States, car batteries are the primary source of lead pollution, according to a study conducted in 2003 by the Michigan-based Ecology Center and the Environmental Defense Fund. The report found that the North American automobile industry contributes to the release or transfer of more than 300 million pounds of lead annually due to mining, smelting, manufacturing, recycling, and disposal, as well as normal vehicle use.
More than 200 million lead-acid batteries could be retired in the near future as automakers switch to new technologies, Chen said.
“When the perovskite cells came out three years ago, we saw they were made of lead, and we got the idea to use car batteries,” said Chen. “We were thinking of how to make the cells without harvesting more lead from the environment.”
A video of the team building a prototype solar panel from a car battery can be viewed here.
“From a general perspective, the concept is very appealing,” said Bob Gibson, a spokesperson for the Solar Electric Power Association. “A big question will be in what it will take to bring this to commercial production and at a price point where it can compete with silicon” solar panels.
Two companies are trying to commercially develop the battery-to-solar-cell technology, according to Chen. “The process is much simpler compared to silicon cells, and you don’t need an expansive facility,” he noted. “The process is expected to be cheaper, so the product would be too.”
The TRUTH will set you FREE.
COAL DYING INDUSTRY
SHARED FROM
Four Charts That Should Make the Coal Industry Nervous,
Very Nervous
Wind energy is on track to break records this year as renewable energy overtakes coal as the source of new electricity generation.
Todd Woody is TakePart's senior editor for environment and wildlife.
Coal-fired power plants still supply about half the United States’ electricity, but those days are numbered. One indicator: The American Wind Energy Association reported Monday that at the end of June, nearly 15,000 megawatts' worth of wind power was under construction.
How much coal-fired capacity was built in all of 2013? A grand total of 1,507 megawatts, according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency.
The U.S. installed three times more renewable energy capacity last year than it did coal. That's in comparison with the 6,861 megawatts’ worth of natural gas–fired power plants that came online in 2013. That capacity is just for so-called utility-scale power plants and doesn’t count, for example, solar panels installed by homeowners and businesses. Californians alone put more than 300 megawatts’ worth of solar panels on their roofs in 2013.
Keep in mind that just 1,032 megawatts of wind power capacity was built in 2013 because of the expiration of a key federal tax credit that brought the industry to a dead stop last year. In January, however, Congress extended the subsidy for another year, triggering the current building boom.
The map below shows how the renewable energy landscape has shifted over the past decade.
Hydropower historically has been by far the largest source of carbon-free electricity in the U.S., as the map from 2003 shows. But by last year, non-hydro renewable energy—mainly solar and wind—was routinely generating more electricity. “April marked the eighth consecutive month that total monthly non-hydro renewable generation exceeded hydropower generation,” the EIA reported last week, noting that the number of states where non-hydropower produced more electricity than hydropower has doubled to 33 since 2003.
Finally, this map shows where wind projects are under construction, indicating the growing economic stakes states have in promoting renewable energy. No state is more invested in wind power than oil-rich, Republican Texas, where nearly 60 percent of that 14,600 megawatts of new electricity capacity is being built.
The TRUTH will set you FREE.
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